New York Times: A Better Way to Zap Our Brains

The findings reinforced the idea that personalized brain stimulation requires determining not just the right area to target but also the right rhythm at which to do so. “The neural code — it’s frequency-specific,” says Robert M.G. Reinhart, one of the study’s authors and the director of the Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience Laboratory at Boston University. “The channel of information-processing in the brain is just like a channel you might tune in to on the radio.”

...by identifying the neural circuits that give rise to particular symptoms, and by showing that alterations to the timing of their firing can change those symptoms, they offer new ways to think about what psychiatric disorders are. “There’s still a lot of stigma around depression that a lot of patients feel,” Scangos says. The subject of her study was no exception: “The fact that there was such an immediate response when we stimulated made her feel like, It’s not something I’m doing wrong; it’s something in my brain that can be addressed.”

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